There are two types of disturbances that affect operation of disc drives, internal disturbances and external disturbances. Examples of internal disturbances include windage encountered by the head/arm assembly due to the rotating disc, noise in the position error signal (PES), structural resonance of the disc drive, motion of the actuator assembly (including the voice coil motor, actuator arm and suspension), imbalance of the disc pack assembly (including the disc pack, spindle and drive motor), written-in runout in the servo patterns due to disturbances during writing of the servo patterns, unmodeled dynamics and non-linearities such as pivot bearing friction, to name a few. External disturbances include environmental (seismic) vibration and external reactions to internal disturbances. Moreover, environmental vibrations during servo writing adversely affect the servo pattern placement, causing written-in runout in the servo patterns written to the disc.
When a disc drive is subjected to disturbances, the radial position of the read/write head in respect to the confronting disc may be affected. Consequently, such disturbances adversely affect head/disc tracking. For this reason, the heads and the data tracks on the disc have some defined width that is large enough to assure that expected motion due to disturbances does not materially affect the performance of the disc drive. Consequently, the effect of disturbances is a limiting factor on the maximum areal data density of the disc drive. While passive damping mounts are used to attenuate these disturbances, they have not been altogether successful due to inadequate compromises in meeting the competing requirements of internal and external disturbance attenuation.
The present invention addresses these and other problems, and offers other advantages over the prior art by providing a process for identifying optimal damping characteristics of a passive damping mount for a disc drive to minimize adverse affects of internal and external disturbances.